ROMANCE SENTIMENTALE & BESCHIN LUG (Jay Leyda: Witnessed Years)

In the organizer's words:

Tue 5.11., 18:30h, with an introduction by David Stirk
ROMANCE SENTIMENTALE Sergej M. Eisenstein, Grigori Aleksandrow F 1930 16 mm English ZT 20'
BESCHIN LUG Bezhin Meadow Sergej M. Eisenstein, Sergej Jutkewitsch, Naum Kleiman USSR 1935-37/1968 35 mm russ. OmeU 31'
ROMANCE SENTIMENTALE was Eisenstein's first sound film experiment, which he shot in Paris with Grigori Alexandrov on his way to the USA. As a commissioned work for the wealthy husband of chanteuse Mara Griy - who sings a sad Russian ballad to a greyhound draped on a bearskin while accompanying herself on the grand piano - the film was held in low esteem for a long time. Yet it can also be seen (and heard) as a free-handed satire on the debate about sound film, in which Eisenstein was a voice that could hardly be ignored. BESCHIN LUG is a belated salvage of the remains of Eisenstein's film of the same name, which was never completed. It tells the story of a deadly conflict between a kulak plotting against the collective farm and his son, a communist pioneer. Filming began in 1935, when Jay Leyda was a student in Eisenstein's directing class, and he was integrated into the team as a set photographer. BESCHIN LUG became a key experience for him, about which he later published many articles and which was symptomatic of the crisis in Soviet filmmaking under Stalin. After the Mosfilm nomenklatura had initially sharply criticized Eisenstein and Tissé for their visual realization of the father-son conflict and, following a lengthy illness of Eisenstein, had finally forced the filming to be abandoned, the material that had already been shot was probably completely destroyed by an incendiary bomb during a German air raid on Moscow in 1941. In the 1960s, however, a large number of individual frames of the film turned up in Eisenstein's estate, which proved to be the beginnings of the shots that had already been filmed. Eisenstein had kept them as memory aids or in wise foresight. In 1968, Jutkewitsch and Kleiman assembled a photo film from these individual images, supplemented by photos taken by Jay Leyda during the shooting, which brings Eisenstein's vision of the film to life with music by Dmitri Shostakovich.